Was it aliens? Was it a virus? Was it art schools? Did they just stop teaching drawing and painting? And only teach post- structuralism and camcording instead? Can we have it all back like it was before? Or is it too late?
And is it all Charles Saatchi’s fault? Shy and bullish at the same time, Saatchi is a contradiction too. His advertising agency in-vented Tony Blair’s Demon Eyes and Labour Isn’t Working and the Pregnant Man. And now he’s got the contract for advertising the Millennium Dome. Originally an outsider, now it seems he’s in charge of everything. Not only art and politics – or anti-art and anti-politics – but the future as well.”Sensation” is the title of the exhibition of some of Saatchi’s vast collection of YBA art, which opens next month at the Royal Academy.

Saatchi didn’t design the blueprint for YBA art, as many people think The YBAs got that from art history itself. They looked at art history with a ruthless eye, saw what was there, chucked out what they thought was useless and kept the rest. A lot of the misconceptions about YBA art revolve around the chucked-out stuff. Does that mean there’s no culture any more? That would be horrible of course. But if the art is anti-art and the institutions are anti-institutions, or imploded institutions, what’s left? That’s certainly the main anxiety about the steady rise of the “YBAs” – the young British artists. (Jake and Dinos Chapman.) Or a mock-Expressionist painting of Myra Hindley. (Marcus Harvey, see also page five.) There’s no authentic painting anymore Only not-painting or anti-painting or ironic painting And there’s no avant-garde any more.

The avant-garde is at the Royal Academy – and the Royal Academy by definition is the opposite of avant-garde. (That’s Gillian Wearing, in her film 10:16.) Or an artist’s tent hand-embroidered with the names of everyone she’s ever slept with, including family members. (Tracey Emin.) Or perfect mannequins of children wearing nothing but new Nikes, with adult sex organs erupting from their foreheads. And what a funny old contradictory, dysfunctional world it is! There’s no Left or Right any more There’s only consumerism There are no messages any more Only ads And there’s no family. Only demented children on council estates telling their stories through the mouths of lip-synched adult weirdoes. What makes young British art what it is? What are its hallmarks? Jokes, glamour, fun Strangeness, oddness, weirdness Not loveliness Sexiness Not aestheticism Anti-aestheticism Not art Life Not the studio The world. Here they come, hand in hand, that demonic female duo: Myra-and- Rose.! Extracted from Joan Smith’s new book, `Different for Girls: How Culture Creates Women’, published this week by Chatto & Windus.

`Review’ readers can buy the book for pounds 8.99 – pounds 2 off the pounds 10.99 published price – P&P free, by calling the TBS 24-hour credit-card line on 01621 819596 and quoting `IoS’ `Different for Girls’ Offer.. With their pathetic male accomplices relegated to the wings, languishing in the shadows of madness and death, the true partners-in-crime are revealed in all their malignant glory. For 30 years, the White Devil held centre stage, her performance tending towards but never quite achieving perfection; now, with the arrival of the Black Widow, the apotheosis is complete. (“The female of the species is more deadly than the male,” as Kipling once claimed.) Yet criminal history shows that the dominant female killer, luring her hapless male partner into crimes he would never for a moment have contemplated committing without her evil prompting, is a myth; we believe in her not because she exists but because, like children who refuse to give up their attachment to Father Christmas, we need her too much to allow inconvenient reality to get in the way. But an even more complex ritual is being played out in our response to these ghastly cases, as the aftermath of the West trial makes clear.Female killers are simultaneously hate-objects who maintain other women in their customary beatific light and Lady Macbeths who incarnate men’s darkest fears and desires: when a woman is bad, she is far, far worse than a man could ever be.